


the sky so wide and dark

by Nemonus



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Alternate Universe - Steampunk, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-17
Updated: 2012-11-17
Packaged: 2017-11-18 22:00:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/565740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack arced forward, lifting her back off her metal bed. It wasn't a move she made often, because it made the cords pull at her neck, and when she leaned back on the metal plate again her skin puckered with the cold. "Let me out of here!"</p><p>Kasumi's hands, locksmiths' hands, reached for the door. "No thank you," she said. "I don't plan on running a criminal empire. Queendom's not my style."</p>
            </blockquote>





	the sky so wide and dark

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies to Neil Gaiman and China Mieville for attempting to steal their style. This was originally written for a deviantArt challenge.

**FREE for ONE NIGHT ONLY. A viewing of the FERAL AND DISTRACTED inmates of PURGATORY PRISON ENGINE. Not suited for the FAINT OF HEART or WOMEN WITH CHILD, this night will prove all the DANGERS and ODDITIES of the ORGANIC RACES.  
  
Your GENEROUS DONATION will be set toward the worthy cause of Purgatory's GOING AWAY. **  
  
The train pulled into the station at night, its black iron body miles long and lit with evenly burning yellow lamps. The rods that turned the wheels slowed as men stood up from their hunch over the piles and dunes of coal and wiped their brows with gloved hands, shedding dark coal dust. The engineer slotted his last lever into place and the guards slipped out, human and turian and batarian in the uniforms of Puragatory, to see what land they had found this time. The doors they emerged from were tall and stabbed with rivets. Sloped roofs and smokestacks in the distance were a slightly deeper darkness. The guards looked up, reading the name of the station, and then disappeared back inside their doors to smoke and drink and throw dice.  
  
There were no windows along the length of the train. Its cars, some long and others segmented into cells like a vast metal caterpillar, hunched in cocoons of black metal.  
  
The prisoners did not need to know where they were.  
  
The prisoners: murderers, thieves, swindlers, and Jack.  
  
The individual cells were rigged with dynamite at the corners, little packets of rock and wires that the wardens could pull if they ever needed to separate warring prisoners. It would be a rocky, sudden drop off the train but they would get the prisoners back, eventually. They always did. And it didn't happen often, this carefully controlled shedding. It didn't have to.  
  
With her biotics Jack could feel the slight gravitic bulge of the explosive packs, the way the corner was weighted down. She could move them if she could just move her hands, but that was a common attempt at an escape tactic that the guards had planned for.  
  
Purgatory had Jack tied tighter than that.  
  
When she turned her head she felt the veins behind her rattle, the heavy, looping intestines of the machinery sunk into the back of her skull shifting with her amp.  
  
She wasn't always like this.  
  
When they caught her, an addict in the alleys, it was almost with pity that they hauled her into the cell. Purgatory stayed where it was for the first few days, leeching off of the town, and Jack railed against the walls of her cell and cursed the wardens and the Red Suns gang equally, her dress torn beyond decency but she was a fallen woman in all ways. She made friends with a turian guard once, let him catch kisses that scarred her from his chitin-mouth, and then when she tried to slip past him in the night he reached out a hand to stop her and she tore out his guts with a biotic hand, and then the other guards fettered her.  
  
She turned, cold air wafting over her shaven head, and the machinery behind her clicked, regulating the steady blue corona flickering around the entire apparatus.  
  
They didn't do it near the stations, because the power that burst from her, independent but reliable, had only one setting. But on the long runs, she could hear the coal scuttlers walking the halls because their job was finished, or at least set temporarily aside.  
  
Jack's arms were weighted down by iron rings, her legs blanketed in her heavy dress, her head crowned with the queen-making corona of the repurposed biotic amp.  
  
She was known as the Ripper in parts of the world, as the newest entrant to the League of Scientific Opium-Drinkers, as the hired knife in Fortune's Den, as a slave.  
  
Now, Jack powered Purgatory.  
  
**WANTED: KASUMI GOTO, age unknown, for theft and impersonation of a C-SEC officer. C100 REWARD. Report any information to SOROCCO YARD or your nearest SECURITY AUTOMATON.**  
  
When they first thought to use Jack as a generator, her abilities to place gravity where she wished it being the equivalent of tens of perpetual motion machines, they drugged her food and starved her until she stopped refusing it. Warden Kuril, his Waterloo's bear teeth poking grotesquely at the edges of his beaked mouth, watched his guards prop her up in the chains and modify her amp. Someone sloshed whiskey into her mouth, most of it spilling down her neck and leaving a sticky brown film.  
  
The back of her neck ached.  
  
They didn't need to incite her in any way to produce the biotics: after a few hours, she felt the power crackling inside her like an electric lamp, liable to shatter its bulb. It had to come out, or it would burn her from the inside.  
  
When she flared she felt the engines shudder and saw the lights flicker like a drunken blink.  
  
She lost days there, in rage and sleep and helpless, blinding lust. She remembered the gang in sooty London breaking bottles and hawking red sand in lacquered wooden boxes. She remembered the underground meetings smoke-filled and eyes glinting. She remembered farther back, before she had been spun across space in a fragile metal aethosphere powered by engines crueler to the universe than to their passengers.  
  
She remembered children, girls and boys in dirty bunks eating Cerberus scraps and fighting because the strong ones got rewarded.  
  
Years and many stations away, although maybe not so many from where she was first made part of the train, she blinked gummed eyes and tried to determine from the sounds what kind of village they had landed in.  
  
The night was quiet, the scent of iron in the air soothed to the faintest fragrance of blood.  
  
Then Jack thought she heard footsteps, soft clickings inside the vaulted, faintly shivering ceiling. She looked up and felt the dry skin across her lips stretching from that small movement. Guards ran by outside, the heat from their skin tugging electricity out from Jack in tiny, fuzzy arcs. They shouted to one another in bugle voices broken by coughs.  
  
The footsteps on the rooftops stopped. Jack closed her eyes and sank back against the spiked cradle of her amp. She was suddenly very aware of the crosshatched iron roof above her, and the innards of the train growing their own stalactites.  
  
Then the door to her cell opened. The handle spun, the locks clicked, and no one walked in. The door closed.  
  
Jack tossed her head and flared.  
  
A pale hand in black leather gloves unfolded out of the air and drew a black cape around the frame of a slight woman in a black dress and hooded shawl. The inside of the cape was patterned with blue stripes like latitudes. The woman gathered the cape up beneath a gear box painted black and hung from her hip like a flask. Bronze and black flashed, hypnotic, and then the woman stood with the black box in her hand, real and solid as the walls of the train. She was wearing boots covered in some kind of waterproof skin with fur still on it, short and slightly greasy.  
  
"What did you do," Jack purred, "that they sentenced you in here with me?"  
  
The woman laughed, a clear noise like jewelry dropped on a tile floor. "I'm not a prisoner." Under the hood, which was cinched like a bonnet, her eyes were shadowed. "Although I might be, in a minute. I hope I don't get caught." She sounded cheery.  
  
Jack saw in her suddenly a means of escape, but the convict's ability to sweet talk was rusty. "Do you know where you are?"  
  
The other woman looked evenly at her. "This is Purgatory. Home of thieves, assorted criminals, and a lot of people in cells. You get a lot of donations from the good citizenry, and I know they weren't using it for the coal....but now I know." She stepped closer. "They're using you to power the train."  
  
"They still use coal."  
  
"Not enough," said the woman. "I've seen the papers. With the money that goes to the warden's dinners I knew it couldn't be right."  
  
Jack hadn't thought about how much her leaked biotics powered the place. Although the idea of being used struck her as thievery, it was no crueler than the faster, rougher bleed of her powers in Cerberus's fights.  
  
Jack said, "Pick the locks in my manacles and I'll rip this room open."  
  
"I think I can do it a quieter way," said the thief.  
  
"Coward. I could take over this place. Kill the guards, uncouple a couple cars, wreck this place and take an aethership if we want. We could be pirate queens." Jack's biotics crackled as she pulled at her chains, muscles standing out above crooked elbows that strained against immobile wrists. The thief just watched from under her bonnet, once stepping back from a lash of blue lightning.  
  
"I don't plan on running a criminal empire," she said. "I don't envy your situation, but I think our paths must divert. Queendom's not my style." She stepped toward the door, unfurling her lined cloak.  
  
Jack arced forward, lifting her back off her metal bed. It wasn't a move she made often, because it made the cords pull at her neck, and when she leaned back on the metal plate again her skin puckered with the cold. "Let me out of here!"  
  
Those hands, locksmiths' hands, reached for the door. "No thank you," she said. "I've already worn the crown jewels."  
  
The door slammed open. Guards stalked inside, still stepping heel-toe to be quiet in the hallway. Jack thought that the thief would be hit by the door, but she spun to the side, as close to Jack as she had ever been, and wrapped the cloak around herself again. She disappeared, leaving the guards to switch their heavy-browed focus to Jack, their prize prisoner and motive force.  
  
She spat and cursed.  
  
"What happened in here?" The Warden asked, but Jack did not answer him.  
  
**Men and women wanted for the ALLIANCE ARMY. Accepted individuals to receive food and lodging, uniform, commission, and one COUNCIL SHILLING at the time of signing.**  
  
Purgatory remained sedentary for days. Jack heard curious families wander through the halls in macabre fascination. They were not allowed into her cell and did not stop at her door. In the nights she slept as she always did - not fitfully, because she had become used to her metal bed, but deeply and unhappily.  
  
A visitor to the train walked up stairs in metal boots just as the sun was going down. Jack could hear it from inside. She had been wondering when the train would move again.  
  
The metal boots could have belonged to a detective or a soldier, not uncommon visitors. She did not wonder about them again until a speaking horn in the hallway blatted out words: "I'm afraid, Commander Shepard, that you are too valuable to leave this station without a price tag."  
  
Jack had been pretty sure that Commander Shepard was dead, but she hadn't been reading newspapers often in her life in Purgatory, or, in fact, beforehand.  
  
She waited.  
  
It didn't pay to think too far ahead in life. You just got bogged down in expecting things.  
  
When the locomotive was severed from the rest of the train, Jack felt it immediately. She felt it with more certainty than even the engineers would have, since the train was stationary. But she knew immediately that the conduits through which her biotics had generated power, sometimes without her even noticing, had become open-ended lines.  
  
She could use those. She was no longer trapped in a circuit.  
  
Jack gathered energy at the back of her neck and flared.  
  
It took time, time in which she gritted her teeth and screamed with the effort of controlling so much power, but when the biotics kicked back she wrenched herself off of the metal bed, bolts popping out of pipes, the manacles still heavy around her wrists. She felt blood drop down the back of her neck, across her tattoos and tattered corset. She slammed against the far wall of the small room and raked the metal with her fingers, then lunged for the door. It opened easily unlocked, and in the hallway she ran a few steps with only 'freedom' in her mind before she thought that she needed some sort of plan.  
  
Killing all of the guards sounded like a good place to start.  
  
Maybe she'd let Kuril suffer a little.  
  
A pistol shot ricocheted out of the next compartment and started filling the train with smoke. The couplings between compartments were protected by overhangs but were otherwise open to the air. The guards had expected their biotic-electric powered locks to hold. Some failsafe that had been. Laughing, Jack stepped down from the train onto the white rocks of the embankment. Wet grass glimmered a few feet away, and on the other side of the tracks she saw house lights and the brick wall of a hamlet. The air was cold and seemed to settle on her skin, but she didn't stand still for very long.  
  
With a biotic surge, she ripped the wall off the nearest train car.  
  
It was full to the brim with guards. Some were alive. Others lay askew against the walls, mown down by three figures in the hallway who she could now see ducking between cells, holding golden-filigreed weapons. One of the bodies looked like Kuril, with his false teeth dangling from his distended jaw. The prisoners in the cells scattered, some talking to themselves, others walking like they were half-dead and looking over their shoulder at her. Most she ignored. Some came at her and she batted them aside. Distracted by the grass, and the sense of freedom, with the sky so wide and dark and starless above her, she lost herself in an impotent rage and stopped to see, breathing heavily, only when the armored man stepped down from the ripped ruins of the train.  
  
Jack was beginning to feel her captivity take its toll on her. Her legs were thin and she tottered like an old woman. Her breath wheezed so that she began to hate her own throat.  
  
She backed up two steps and examined the people who had started all of this.  
  
The leader was armored head to toe in red and black and gold. Through his small visor she could see intense eyes, their color too tinted for her to identify. He carried what looked to her inexperienced eyes like a big-game gun. The woman beside him was a quarian, wearing the puffy trousers of her species, cinched tight around her waist and sealed at her ankles with metal rings to keep out toxic atmospheres. A pink, wheeled automaton with what looked like a simple cat's face neatly painted on the front trundled out of the train after her.  
  
The third man was a drell wearing a preacher's collar and carrying a sword.  
  
"Jack!" The armored man called, and she was surprised to realize that no one had used her name in quite some time.  
  
It scared her.  
  
"What do you want?"  
  
"We need your help. We have a project I think you could work on."  
  
"I don't know you from Adam."  
  
"I'm Commander Shepard." He took off the mask. He had about as much hair on his head as she did, but a stubbled jaw. Old, pink scars stretched across his right cheek like clawmarks.  
  
"Yeah, I've got that," Jack said. "I thought you were dead."  
  
He said, "Things change."  
  
She started to walk away, then re-decided and pumped biotics to her hands to fly instead. The drell raised his sword and the quarian raised her pistol.  
  
Shepard said, "I think you might want revenge on Cerberus."  
  
Jack drifted to the ground. She could feel the want for revenge running over her skin like goosebumps and she wondered whether destroying this train could quell it.  
  
She had been waiting for a long time.  
  
"Tell me more," she said, and walked closer to him. The aliens spread to either side, warily.  
  
Commander Shepard, of whom she had heard that he had commanded a fleet of aeroships and died in the ether, turned his back on her.  
  
The invitation made her lips curl.  
  
Then she saw the stitch marks.  
  
He had a biotic amp too, a small, neat bronze box staining the back of his skill, but there were tiny black stitches up the back of his head like a zipper and another angular track of them diving underneath his collar. She moved closer, squinting in the dark to see this strange biological handiwork, and he turned around.  
  
"They didn't do the same thing to me that they did to you," he said, "and I can't imagine what they did to you in Purgatory, but if you listen to me, we can make it right."  
  
She looked at the alien's eyes. The quarian quipped, "You better hurry and make your decision. The villagers are going to come out with pitchforks."  
  
She sounded defensive, but that was true. Somebody would have to clean up this mess. Prisoners would be escaping.  
  
Jack looked back to Shepard. He was handsome, in a sharp way.  
  
"Don't try to sympathize with me, pansy," she said. "But I do like a good revenge. Where do I sign up?"


End file.
